Tesla’s vehicles now respond ‘hello’ in hint at upcoming voice assistant

Tesla appears to be getting closer to launching a highly-anticipated Voice Assistant, as its vehicles will now respond when greeted.

As spotted by Not a Tesla App earlier this week, Tesla owners can now greet their vehicles by pressing the Voice Command button and saying “Hello” or “Hi,” to which the car will respond by saying “Hello!” Previously, Tesla’s vehicles would simply respond by saying, “command not understood,” so the response suggests that the company is actively developing its voice assistant feature which has been long requested by the community.

The outlet also notes that the update seems to be coming from Tesla’s own servers, meaning that users don’t have to have the holiday update installed yet to experience the response. Tesla also interprets user speech remotely on its own servers, and the company has previously hinted that the xAI language model Grok would eventually run on all company vehicles.

Credit: Not a Tesla App

Last November, Elon Musk liked a post saying that a smaller version of chatbot Grok would run natively on Tesla’s vehicles, likely used in part as a voice assistant for the company’s cars with updated hardware.

In May, code sleuth greentheonly discovered that Tesla had seemingly begun developing its voice assistant program by adding a “wake word” activation setting in the internal source code of one of the company’s updates. Not unlike when users say “Hey Alexa” to activate Amazon’s voice assistant, rather than how Tesla drivers currently have to press a button to engage voice commands.

During Tesla’s October 10 Cybercab unveiling event, the company also teased a potential Voice Assistant feature for the Cybertruck, and it has been making major improvements to its ability to understand user voice requests for over a year.

It’s still unclear exactly when Tesla plans to launch its own voice assistant in its vehicles, but the arrival of a single response suggests that it’s on the company’s radar and is actively being developed.

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Tesla posts teaser for potential Cybertruck “voice” feature

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